Intro

This is the storage place for my longform thoughts, organized in the Table of Contents here. You should just go read there.

Most of these are culled from three social media presences:

Prequels Redeemed, a Marxist analysis of the Star Wars Prequels and other low-culture movies. There's an emphasis on class, universalism, and artistic technique here.

Bambamramfan, a humanist oriented tumblr account adjacent-to-but-highly-confrontational-with the rationalist sphere. There's more of an emphasis on our shared humanity, and analyzing the form of ideology, and current political commentary here.

Left Conservative, a Word Press that collects thoughts and articles about the collision between tribalism and modern life. There's a lot of looking at what tribes believe about themselves, even when we might disagree with the particular tribe strongly.

You can also find my shorter thoughts on twitter and the occasional reddit comment. I very rarely post to Fanfiction.net.

HIVLI

I've seen in the rationalistsphere a lot of dividing people into binary personality models, that are useful and different from the more popular stereotypes (though obviously as simplistic as any binary model.) High decouplers vs low decouplers is a really big one, though also high agency vs low agency. (These descriptions are usually "high x vs low x" with implicit emphasis that the "high" group is better.)

I'm going to add one binary that I think has not gotten nearly enough attention, though you can decide whether I favor the high or low half.

High Impulsiveness

We are used to impulsiveness as just a straight up bad word, like someone who lacks the discipline to resist temptation. Really it's not even about people, but more about moods we can fall into and should be avoided.

I think that's bollocks - not only are some people more impulsive, but it's not even an entirely *bad* thing and has some real positive contributions.

An impulsive person acts on an idea without thinking about it a lot. It could be the decision to throw the first punch in a fight, it could be kissing someone without worrying if it will be reciprocated, it might be deciding to throw a giant party just because, it might be buying a cool new jacket from the leather store, it might be pivoting your business into an entirely new sector, and it very very often is tweeting something on the spur of the moment.

And let's be honest - we love some of the impulsive people in our life. We love how they drop everything for us in a moment of need, we love how they surprise us with a spontaneous gift, we love how they are the first to say I love you. This impulsiveness is hella charismatic because all of their actions feel genuine and powerful and they just do a lot more actions showing their affection than people who think about it too much.

A high impulse person never lies because they believe what they are saying at the time. It might contradict what they said in the past, or what they will follow through on in the future, or even what the state of the world actually is, but they could sure as hell pass a lie detector test saying it right now.

Elon Musk is famous as a high impulse person, boldly creating new companies and leading industries because he decided HE CAN DO IT and doesn't waste any time thinking about the reasons it's not feasible.

On a whim, he bought a $1 million sports car and this is what happened to it:

FWIW, this was on the way to signing a major deal with Thiel.

My contention is that it is no coincidence that the man who reinvented the electric car industry and private space travel, completely wrecked his uninsured million dollar car trying to impress another billionaire. These are two sides of the same coin.

Low Impulsiveness

I think of the epitome of High Impulse vs Low Impulse is Trump vs Clinton in 2016. If you ask a LI person something, they will want to pause and consider the answer - is it true, does it accord with the rest of the world, will it upset anyone, are there any necessary qualifications on this?

To the media viewer, this looks like a calculating liar who is choosing what truth you should get to hear. The more "honest" person was the one "shooting from the gut" and answering immediately and unambiguously. Which answer actually turned out to be "true" is something that would be lost until the question was long forgotten.

A low impulse person wants to plan out what they are doing, what are the risks, how to mitigate them, even if they succeed one time will they be able to consistently stick to replicating this. (Hillary and Obama have been married one time each, even as we both have seen the tribulations of those marriages. Trump and Musk have been married, what, 8 times total?)

Some people reading this will just say this is a new label on high agency vs low agency people. And there is *some* correlation - a lot of high impulse people (again like Trump or Musk) are very high agency, and many low impulse people can be depressed, defeatist and think nothing is worth doing (usually myself.)

But I don't think that's accurate, these traits aren't the same thing. You can be high impulse / low agency - that's usually a depressive that lashes out at everything around them. And low impulse / agency is the stereotype of the master planner who has figured out exactly how everything will go.

You might say that high impulse people have higher VARIANCE than low impulse people, and the effect we're actually measuring is variance. I don't think that's what's going on at the personal level, so it's not useful for describing the people involved and why they do things and causality.

But the point about high variance is that high impulse people fuck up a lot. They lead to ALL SORTS OF MISTAKES and costs that the low impulse people justifyingly grumble about. Which is why our prisons are mostly full of high impulse people (but then so are our performing stages.)

For a long time, what it took to get ahead at the highest levels of power, was iterated successes, and that weeded out a lot of high-impulse people. HI people would fuck up eventually, and they'd go to jail or lose all the money or piss off the wrong people or lose their reputation and they'd stop advancing. Which is how we got a stereotype of national leaders as wishy washy grey emotionless blobs - those were the only ones who could survive a gauntlet of potential mistakes in the press or gossipy political games.

We've clearly entered a new era where downsides are limited, and enough success can overcome any failure. If, as a business leader, you can get 10% of the people to LOVE you, they can buy your stock and buoy you, even as 90% of people hate every decision you make.

We're seeing its effects the most in politics - Trump can't do anything to lose the confidence of his people so long as the other people hate him, so "shooting from the hip" every second of every day works wonders for him, even as it leads to meaningless policy and complete denial of reality.

But we see its growth in the media with independent substacks and other influencer platforms. So long as you can never be truly knocked out, the strategy of "gamble everything, keep trying to get attention" beats out most of the planners and low impulsiveness.

I think this is a bad thing, but it's not because I exclusively prefer Low Impulse behavior. HI people are super fun. But our leadership needs some combination of people with "emotional spontaneity" and people doing "thoughtful engagement with reality", and drifting too much in the former direction has fairly obvious disastrous consequences.

 

The Triangle of Other People

It is a common piece of advice in these parts to "treat people like ends, not an object." (Especially dating advice.) Even if you haven't heard of it that way, you've probably heard some dichotomy about treating people like an object (bad) versus... not doing that (good!)

This is a good starting place for authentic relationships, but integrity insists that it's not really truthful. It's missing quite a lot.

For starters, what does it mean to treat people as "an ends?" The dichotomy proposed here is that when you treat people like objects that's selfish, whereas doing things for the good of others is the "right way."

But in reality, generosity and objectifying are two different things, on two different axes. The father who literally whips his boy into shape is doing it "for his son's own good" (or at least believes this), but we would object strongly to this. And we all know someone who has obsessed over and intruded on a crush, believing with all their heart the target of their affection would be so happy and better off if they agreed to date.

I think the spirit this advice is trying to convey is not just about "for the sake of others" but that we should think of them more like we think of ourselves, than as objects without free will or self-knowledge. They have the right to make decisions with full knowledge, and when they have spoken for their preferences we should not question them as if we know better.

I would call this treatment Agentic. We treat them like fellow agents in the game of life.

Now, agentic treatment is not always the same as good or selfless. When someone absolutely chews you out in a bitter tirade, the agentic response is to believe "they must hate me" and a more objectifying response might be "they're low on blood sugar, feeling stress from other life events, and possibly only two years old. They don't really mean it." If we are honest, there are many cases in life when it is more generous to see someone as an object under various pressures, than to take every word they say seriously.

It's a very tricky balance, and when uncertain you should probably lean towards agentic treatment. But also sometimes our friends really need a coffee before we continue this tense discussion. (And sometimes you are an object too and you should treat yourself as such.)

If someone says they want sushi for lunch, even though you know they've always been disappointed in sushi when they got it, you have the choice of treating them like an object (refusing sushi) or like an agent (getting sushi.)

But there's another entire angle of how to treat people: as Ideals. An object is a something less than us, that we want to get something practical from (money, a vote, sex, etc) and we would then discard. But sometimes we see people as more than that - people represent ideals in our head. Our crush may not be on the actual person, and it may not be about wanting them for kisses, but about seeing them as an ideal of beauty or innocence or acceptance or stability. We don't want them to DO something for us, we want them to BE something for us, perfect and pure.

In common parlance, it's "putting someone on a pedestal."

Unfortunately, ideals are simple and people are complex, and this is a horrible format of how to treat them. Often they don't know that they represent this thing, or don't want to if they knew. Representing someone's "only hope of romantic acceptance" is a very heavy burden to bear, and most wise people shy away from that.

And even if you were okay with it... ideals are simple and durable, while humans are complex and fragile. You will fail to live up to this ideal, and then the giver of this affection will become disappointed and bitter. And if they are not able to deal with that, then they will lash out at you. When you have used up an Object, you just ignore it - but when an Ideal is broken, you want to destroy it. Sometimes that is a whole lot worse.

Ideal isn't always bad - your parent or your boss or a superstar probably wants to be an ideal. But when it gets bad, it gets really bad.

Now, in a simple world I would just say there is a spectrum from Object to Ideal and Agentic lies in the happy middle. But I don't see any reason that's actually true, so we get something more like this ugly chart.

I even made a small dot for what I consider "the best position to be in, on average." Though circumstances will vary widely in the best response.

An example of the explanatory power of this triangle. In the Nice Guy Discourse Wars of a decade ago, there was always confusing dissonance at "players treat girls like objects to be used up, whereas I want to worship her. Why is all the online anger at me?" And I think part of that is because many women knew that if they weren't going to be treated like agents, they'd rather be objects than ideals.

Sim-Modernism

I've been thinking about the endless war between Modernism and Post-Modernism. Not even a debate, since so much of the discussion is about even defining the borders and who is on what side. To restate things:

Modernism is the James Scott sense of a belief that we can figure out the rules and principles - behind the universe, life sciences, sociology, morality and ethics - and our leaders can apply them to create an ordered and just society. The Enlightenment was big on Modernism, and really Marxism was its apex. 

Post-Modernism is the post-WW1 understanding that none of these rules ever consistently work and the world is nigh-impossible to understand, and any rules we *think* we have about the world are really just stories we tell ourselves, to justify our position in society or to advance one political side over another. It's very meta, often in the Bulverist sense. 

(Pre-Modernism just being the regular traditionalist "I do this because my ancestors' ancestors were doing this hundreds of years ago. And because God, speaking through His divinely chosen ruler, tells me to or else He will strike me dead.")

A key thing about both of these philosophical schools is that they can't really be disproven. If a modernist regime fails, obviously they just had bad laws instead of good laws, or the people didn't try hard enough to stick to these principles. And post-modernism never fails, it's failure is just a story *you* tell to justify your opposition to it.

(Really you should think of both of these as tools to analyze situations with, sometimes even using both tools on the same situation and asking yourself which is more useful in this moment. But anyway.)

I'm not going to resolve the war between these things today, but just talk about another *modernism I see that is neither of these.

***

Let's talk about World of Warcraft.

It's the extremely big MMO that has had millions of players for well over a decade now. In the beginning, we knew nothing about the undercarriage of how the game worked (what items dropped from what, how good they were, etc.) Over time we figured out some principles, and we got large forums called "Elitist Jerks" where people argued over the best classes, the best ability rotations, the best gear, etc etc. They referenced guides and came up with general theories and had vibrant conversations. This is clear modernism.

Then almost all the conversations died, and people talk very little on the forums last I checked, compared to years at its prime.

What happened? Politics and post-modernism?

No, what happened was Big Data.

Eventually someone built a downloadable tool called simcraft. It knew every spell, boss, item, and talent in the game. You could just input all your gear, the skills you used, the order you used them in rotation, the general style of fight and... hit a button and it would tell you how much damage per second (DPS) you would do with perfect execution.

This is in some ways a cludge. Few of us have perfect execution, after all. And this doesn't cover utility, tanking, and healing and so those needed other sims with more assumptions. And there were a number of errors anyone could find with its assumptions. But it at least gave a concrete answer to argue over.

Now anytime anyone had a question of "is this talent underrated, because combined with this weapon, on this fight you could..." and the only answer would be "sim it." If sims reliably showed your new idea was better, the top raiders would drift to that, and then the way they did things would trickle down to everyone else. No one really had to argue about which class was the best - there were numbers for it.

The "skill" of the world of warcraft community got better, and the discourse of it dimmed. Just sim it.

Now this would just be an anecdote about games, except for the fact that Big Data is entering more and more of our life.

If you have any problem that can be addressed by throwing it at GIANT FUCKTON OF DATA, now people do that. We often don't know *why* the correlation between two things is the way it is, but we know it's correlated now.

Our incipient AI's aren't Asimovian entities built on three principles taken to their logical conclusions. They're neural nets trained on a ton of data and reinforced with adjustments to hell and back. They give very good answers (and beat us at boardgames.) We generally don't have any modernist explanation for what they are thinking or what rules they are following. 

While manipulating training sets is as old as data science, with big data we are talking about sets too big for naive actors to change a few datum and get the answers they want (plus part of this mythos is that anyone can run the simulations themselves if they want to.) The simulations are still built very much on human error, but they are too large and incomprehensible to be easily hijacked by postmodernists into giving the simple answers they want (or rather, that they claim ideologues want.)

This is Sim-Modernism.

We don't just see it in videogame sims and GPT outputs. We see it when someone asks our favorite route from NYC to Philadelphia and we answer "...I just follow whatever Google tells me to." We see it in the most famous political prognosticator of our era not making a simple political model (like Sam Wang would), but rather the model with the most inputs they can imaginably throw in, run the simulation 10,000 times, and see what the results look like. Nate Silver has some idea why his models will favor one party or the other, but he still is in the dark often on what is going on "under the hood." We sort of see it in Tetlock's Superforecaster-ism. And most of all we see it in algorithms on social media and video sites, that are trained to get the most "engagement" from audiences, and so start throwing up bizarre recommendations that no tech executive would have predicted or even wanted.

A lot of the answers Sim-Modernism gives are pretty good! And even more useful, they are plentiful. Sim-Modernism isn't limited to theorizing what a good novel is, it can generate a new one in seconds, or hundreds of new novels for you to read, once it gets good enough.

I'm not celebrating this as "WE HAVE THE ANSWER that cuts the Gordian knot of modernism." Sim-Modernism does get more accuracy than either regular Modernism or Post - but it's obviously scary in its own way. It means running or being a part of a system that you don't know how it works or where it is really leading you.

(Has anyone else had the experience of driving well out of your way because Google says this path is faster, only to find it eventually requires you to drive through an area you wouldn't have - either because construction means it's really blocked, or it's a suburb that feels like cheating to treat as a bypass?)

And, it will feel sad, in a humanistic way, to live a life that is more efficient but not to understand any of its underpinnings. Do this because "the sim said it is optimal" is not a lot more satisfying than "because your father did and your father's father did..."

And of course, we will have to deal with "whether a computer code that is just regurgitating predictions based on a very large sample of text" is a person or not when it answers questions.

------

Note, this is not the same thing as ontology-thru-markets, be it the Wall Street Stock Market or the smallest online predictive market. Those are most driven by intelligent, optimizing agents interacting with each other and then iterating on what will get the best results given other intelligent optimizing agents, who then iterate based on that. Which is interesting, and profitable, but not really just running models and regressions through a very large load of static data.

Modern Virtue Ethics

Watching RRR - which is a maximalist Indian film about the conflict between utilitarianism and deontic ethics - reminded me that ye olde “virtue ethics” is the red-headed step child of online discussions. Sure, maybe you know it’s been kicking around since Aristotle (and will henceforth be referred to as Aristotelian ethics, or AE), or that for a long time this was the dominant ethical framework of Europe, but now what does it mean? AE is often framed as “if you do something with good intent.” Sounds nice but how can that really compare to “making the best result” (consequentialism) or “doing right instead of wrong” (deontology). Caring about your intent about all just sounds so self-centered.

So, ignore that. Wipe everything you know about virtue ethics clean, and approach this as just a blank state. Instead, picture this:

“Aristotelian ethics is a marriage between consequentialism and deontology that best approximates how we actually feel about right action.”

What the hell does that mean?

Well, if you are in this discourse sphere, you are familiar with “Terminal Values.” This is understanding what thing you measure your success by. An easy one is just “maximum number of lives.” Or perhaps maximizing knowledge. Or if you’re a libertarian maybe you say freedom is your terminal value. Or amount of joy in the world. Other well known terminal values are the infamous paperclip maximizer, or villains with the famous “blue-orange” morality spectrums, etc.

Here’s the dirty little secret about terminal values: they are almost always all *instrumental values* too. Knowledge is prized as a good in of itself… but also helps us effect the world so that our lives are better in a number of ways, and that even feeds into us being able to acquire knowledge faster. More people being alive means a larger community advancing our values and creating a thicker network that we exist in. More people alive means we have more choices which means we have more freedom… which is a terminal value too but freedom also allows people to make the best choices for themselves and lead to the best outcomes. 

Being a person who does not lie and helps others can feel righteous in of itself… but also makes it easier for others to trust you and work with you, making your life better and more successful.

So, do we truly value knowledge for its own sake damn everything else, or do we value knowledge because it adds to our toolset that helps us accomplish overall utilitarian goals.

The answer is: yes.

Aristotelian ethics has an image of the “good life” that includes knowledge, as both something fulfilling on its own AND something that makes us better at accomplishing our goals, including gathering even more knowledge. These simply aren’t separable. 

A good life includes freedom, which makes you feel less trapped on its own, and also helps you attain goals that were stymied when you were trapped.

A good life is healthy, which makes you feel and look better now, AND gives you more years of life later. A good life treats others well both because that is right AND you get farther in life as a cooperator than as a defector.

It’s like saying “don’t cut your arm because that will cause pain, AND ALSO you use that arm for things.” Your arm - and your health, your freedom, your knowledge, your honor - is part of an organic whole. It IS YOU and it helps you accomplish things.

(Obviously this “organic whole” can scale from your one life, to the entire picture of society, which is maximizing lives, joy, knowledge, freedom for everyone in the society as it grows itself.)

There are things that make you feel good but destroy your abilities - like heroin. AE says don’t do that. Or there are things that have better consequences but narrow who you are - like going to a soulless finance job just so you can live on instant-ramen and donate all of your income to malaria nets. AE hates that. These things are not “the good life” and do not “broaden the organic whole.” There are indeed values that are not part of Aristotelian virtues.

You can dislike this approach, but you can’t really argue against it, because it is a postulate in of itself. It can’t fail consequentialist measures because it’s not trying to. It’s very hard to argue about a first ethical principle, after all.

The reason AE has appeal is because it is intuitively how so many people act and feel. Most people at most times do not want to entirely ignore consequences just to Do the Right Thing. But most people do not want to ignore and torture their conscience for years just because it will lead to a marginally better off long-term outcome. We want to… flourish. We want to be good in many ways - health, morality, intellect, happiness - and we rather all the various societal numbers go up rather than down.

So, when the “virtue ethics” response is “what would a good person do in this situation” it does not mean “good intentions are what matters” but “what adds to my flourishing and society’s flourishing, on the many axes that matter to us?”

***

Hat tips to https://an-irrelevant-truth.tumblr.com/ for the tumblr image, and https://twitter.com/peligrietzer for discussing the idea generally.

Popularism and its Discontents

 

(Is no one going to make the obvious joke?)

Anyway, "popularism" is the hot button term among lefty technocratic circles popularized by the likes of David Shor and Matt Yglesias. You can read Ezra Klein's very thorough interview on the subject in the NYT. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html or use Wayback machine to circumvent the paywall.)

Popularism is a shorthand for the belief that the Democratic Party, when it is trying to get politicians elected, should focus on policies that are popular and downplay things that are unpopular and irrelevant. Lot's of commercials about cheaper prescription drugs and border enforcement, less talking about systematic racism and anti-capitalism. And by popular we mean "tested in polls, and especially among white voters over fifty with no college degree."

It's obviously a response to perceptions of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the 2020 Democratic primary, and it leans heavily on the success of the Biden campaign, and the specific tactics Obama used in his two successful elections (where he was anti-gay marriage and cautious on immigration.)

Shor and Ygs and others have pushed this tactic in a very loud way, to counter what they see as groupthink among center-left staffers and activists in institutional non-profits, who value staying in like over effectiveness. And fair enough, we can all see where they are coming from.

But predictably, popularism has come in for a lot of criticism. Sometimes issues are more popular after they have passed and begun providing benefits. Sometimes you want to pass a policy because you believe in it, that's why you got elected after all. Sometimes you need to get your base excited and elections aren't entirely about the median voter. Republicans will say bad things about us no matter what we do (they certainly don't hesitate to call us socialists even when Democrats are like, de-regulating zoning restrictions.) Why do Republicans keep saying unpopular things but still winning elections anyway? And the rhetoric politicians use themselves can move public opinion. Playing to the crowd will only lead to centrist milquetoast policy that doesn't change America's underlying problems.

(Since they are always-online-political-pundits, the popularists of course have rebuttals to all of these questions.)

Most importantly I think, the line between "who is a political staffer that has an obligation to stay on message" and "who has responsibility to more people than just today's electoral campaign" is pretty vague, and I don't see why, say, the Ford Foundation which has been around for most of a century would feel obligated to change their message to fit the Harris 2024 campaign's needs. It's not clear who Shor and Ygs are really talking to.

Popularism is just one particular strategy, and I am sure if it gets lots of buy in, eventually it will have one high profile embarrassing loss. I do not recommend anyone put all their credibility eggs in their one basket, or else you'll become one of those people parsing all the data with a fine-tooth comb to say "if you look at this cross tab and that local trend, you'll see really we overperformed the fundamentals and popularism has never failed, it can only be failed."

You don't want to be that.

There is a more fundamental point, that these pundits risk losing for getting lost in the ideological weeds.

"Candidates should try to do what works."

The parsing of all messaging by all Democrats running for office to be acceptable to sensitive college-degree holders who live in big cities... has not paid dividends for the success of the party. The emphasis on supporting idealistic and edgy symbolic causes du jour over what bills can actually be passed and deliver results to voters this year, does not seem to make any situation better when you look at the results. It's not entirely fair to say "a decade of policing speech got Trump elected" but it's at least fair to say that attitude did nothing to *stop* Trump from winning, and the most reviled candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary from winning as well.

I don't think there is One Consistent Plan that will always win you elections. But a serious movement should care about what does and doesn't win. And when one tactic doesn't seem to be helping, it should be willing to drop that and try other tactics. "Winning" is not solely confined to elections, but it should be mostly about "policy change." You should care about what tactics change policy, and lead to better policy rather than irrelevant or badly designed policy. Popularism is a nod towards that, but it's really not the end all and be all of being politically responsive.

Distortion and Disgust

I want to talk about two terms that are very weighty in a *moral* sense, but I believe should be looked at as neutral in *ethical* senses. So we’re going to take a more detached, clinical view in this discussion, and trying to remember that each are tools that could be used in either good or evil ways, from an ethical perspective.

The first let’s call *distortion*, although disharmony would work too. This is the warp in the normal state of affairs, or just the sense of heavy weight, when something is going dramatically wrong. If someone has a family life where they are constantly being yelled at and shamed, they may find their work starts suffering as well. That result, where one disruptive thing bleeds into all the things around it and causes difficulty, is distortion.

Distortion occurs when the harmonious state of affairs (a stable, happy community or universal agreement on norms) is interrupted by some disagreeable agent. That agent could be a stranger coming to town, or a member of the group behind closed doors acting terribly to others, or one personally privately coming to realizations that the group and its rules don’t make sense. Notably it can’t be a “typical” problem that the society is set up to deal with, but rather one that is unexpected by the normal social working order. Simplistically, a mugger beating someone up is not distortion, but a police officer doing so is.

Harmony is a watchword in Marxist and Zizekian language, since both schools are so quick to point out how often harmony is a lie that seeks to pave over any contradictions within itself, or the experiences of members that do not match the beliefs of the community. However from a practical and common sense perspective, we know that some level of harmony is just a basic necessity for life, and someone who does nothing but kick over the blocks of other people’s harmony is violent and unpleasant. Some harmonies in the short term are beneficial, and some harmonies are repressive and unacceptable. (In the long term, all harmonies collapse, but so does life.) What matters is not putting “harmony” entirely in one ethical box, but taking the non-normative stance that “if harmony exists, and matters, then distortion exists, and matters.”

One positive example of distortion is the stranger who comes to town and tells the underclass and slaves to no longer accept their position, but to strive for equal treatment. One negative example of distortion is the spouse who is having an affair so they lie about where they were last night so they have to ask their friends to cover an alibi for them so their friends have to lie to their spouses about what they were doing and so on and so on.

While very different ethically, in both cases we see a dynamic of something that cuts across typical categorizations and separations (where a problem is contained to one box), and creates a weight that affects everything around it, if only a little. It’s like Einstein’s ball on a bedsheet, bending spacetime around it.

Identified this way, we can see there are many sources of distortion in our lives. A deeply held disagreement that two friends can not talk about. Someone who often shows extreme and volatile emotions. A superior constantly asking too much of their subordinate. A dramatic mismatch between what we want and what we feel allowed to express. (For this reason, distortion is very much tied up with “legibility”, the domain of what society understands and finds legitimate reason for grievance.) Gay people in the closet experienced distortion this way. If someone clearly has a strong crush on you but never acts on it, your nervousness around them and how to deal with it could be distortion.

Almost always, distortion blurs lines of liberal ontology. If civil society is built on “these matters are the domain of the job, and these of the family” or “this is the way you voice complaint about approved matters” and above all the restraint to not let your personal feelings interfere with your institutional duties, then distortion mocks all of the above. It is the repressed howl, and is powerful exactly to the degree that the superego doesn’t accept it. (If the rules of society gave your complaint voice, then it would no longer be distortion.)

It is useful to have an ethically neutral term here because then you can point at something and say “that’s distortion.” A community may be changing due to an influx of new members with different beliefs, or a friend may be burdened under too many emotional demands that they have committed to all of them freely, and normal moral language only allows us to say whether these things are good or bad. We can take note “these scenarios have weight and will create many smaller changes around them.” We can avoid the denial that “nothing unpleasant will happen” while still admitting in some cases this distortion is good (maybe the community needed change) or in some cases the distortion is bad (maybe the friend’s friends need to adjust their expectations even if the person is not asking for it.)

(Distortion and unexplainable crying jags basically go hand in hand.)

Obviously, there’s no easy guide for how to deal with distortion. Sometimes you *should* use it as a signal to address important and neglected matters. Sometimes you *should* push it down because it’s not worth destroying a harmony you depend on, and it’s not that hard to deal with. It has a lot to do with the context, the nature of the distortion, and the value of the harmony. Anyone trying to sell you a one-size fits all approach is… well selling their own simplistic harmony that our unique and varied experiences will inevitably distort. (It is tragically true that even if someone might believe that the costs of distortion are worth it for the harmony they want to preserve, as a practical matter the distortion *just might not let them do that*. That’s how it works after all, even if we don’t want it to.)

But understanding, as a first step, is a maneuver of strength, and it can be easier to do without ethically loading the answer from the outset.

Distortion comes up a lot for me when I am thinking about societies with high inequality or winner-take-all lottery professions (movie stars, academia, etc). By and large the participants of those economies follow the liberal, systemized rules for behavior (or when they don’t, their failures are clearly prosecutable.) But the huge power differential between two different participants of a system creates incentives and desires that distorts normal action. It’s hard to be a genuine friend, or express honest critique, or legibly give consent in these structures. If you desperately need someone to recommend or vouch for you or just give you charity and mentorship, then saying no to or disappointing them becomes very difficult, and that problem then spreads into other problems involving bad communication or repressed feelings. However, it’s not as easy to say “because you had power over this person, it’s your fault they weren’t honest with you” (well some people do say it but it always makes me flinch for how simplistic and callow it is.)

***

*Disgust* is always used in a morally-loaded sense. Either we are talking about something that disgusts us - rotten food, cruel behavior, a violation of our boundaries - and our loathing is so strong that it needs to claim a moral dimension. OR we’re talking about someone’s objection we disapprove of, such as a Trumpian hatred of immigrants, and we say they have disgust, and it is phrased as if their disgust is immoral and something they need to purge themselves of. I agree with both these takes, I’m just noting that disgust is usually moral or immoral but not amoral.

And yet, knowing this word disgust can encompass both good and bad disgust, we can talk about it in an ethnically neutral way, and open its usage for some important middle ground. Disgust after all is an instinctive, emotional reaction. We can then build rational structures over it to justify it, but the reaction comes before those structures. What can we say of the purely emotional reaction then?

Well it’s unlikely to be always correct. Things we feel at least sometimes we want to reconsider in the light of reflection and more evidence. But it’s also a powerful preference, and we shouldn’t always dismiss it based on “this does not accord with my principles and rational thought” anymore than whether we like pizza and pineapple needs a reasoned justification to be respected.

For example, I play a lot of Hearthstone and watch a lot of Hearthstone tournaments. After one tournament, a winning player in his interview endorsed revolution in Hong Kong. Afraid of Chinese reaction to that, the company that ran the show, Blizzard: deleted the interview, banned the player for a year, revoked his prize money, and banned the broadcasters that interviewed him. It was roundly derided as political cowardice by the company.

I felt disgust at Blizzard’s actions. I felt myself unable to watch their tournaments in the following days. Now I had two options. One, I could build on that disgust to boycott Blizzard, and find reasons they were worse than other profit-oriented videogame companies (or quit videogames altogether), and always find justifications to link anything this company does in the future to that one bad decision. Or two, I could decide that in the grand scheme the decisions of this PR department were not outside the norm for other profit-oriented videogames, that the amusement of animations or the quality of card balance had nothing to do with this decision, and I could just suck it up and force myself to watch Hearthstone even as my stomach felt uncomfortable at it.

Neither of these were really satisfactory to me. I just didn’t watch Hearthstone for a week, and I got over it. This is not at all ethically consistent. (You could make some pragmatic argument that *this week* was the way to show Blizzard my disappointment, but I can’t claim that was my clever aim.) I allowed the moral feeling to guide me at one time period, but I didn’t try to adhere to it in the long term. In some ways this is unfortunate, as I’d rather be ethically consistent. But the two options were worse, and in the long run, lead to you molding your own beliefs in bad ways just to satisfy a temporary gut feeling.

***

With both distortion and disgust it’s very useful to have a term that encompasses clear empirical phenomenon without necessarily having to come to an ethical judgment right away. In response to one of the unending accusations of immoral behavior among videogame developers, you can categorize your disgust as making you not want to engage with their game currently and talk about it, before making long term pronouncements about whether they are deserving a boycott. You can say that something bad happened in that distortionary environment, and acknowledge the serious pain of that, before you figure out if a crime that broke established norms happened.